The Amazon rainforest is a 5.5 million km² forest in South America that covers much of northwestern Brazil and extends into Colombia, Peru and other South American countries.

It is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, famed for its biodiversity.

It’s crisscrossed by thousands of rivers, including the powerful Amazon. River towns, with 19th-century architecture from rubber-boom days, include Brazil’s Manaus and Belém and Peru’s Iquitos and Puerto Maldonado.

One in ten known species in the world lives in the Amazon rainforest.

The region is home to about 2.5 million insect species, tens of thousands of plants, and some 2,000 birds and mammals.

One in five of all the bird species in the world live in the rainforests of the Amazon, and one in five of the fish species live in Amazonian rivers and streams. Scientists have described between 96,660 and 128,843 invertebrate species in Brazil alone.